"All alone?" asked the tenor, fluting with his voice, as he always did when he was speaking to a woman. "All alone," said Dorothy. "Isn't it too bad?" They discussed loneliness with poetic similes harvested from the sea, upon the horizon of which nothing but a solitary tramp, hull down, was visible. So long as Mr. David Bligh's attention had been devoted to Miss May Seymour, the leading lady, Dorothy had been inclined to think that he was not very good-looking, that he did not possess a very good voice, and that probably he was not quite a gentleman. Now that he was beside her on this lonely beach she was inclined to modify all these judgments in his favor, and when suddenly he burst forth into "_Che gelido manino_," suiting the action to the word by simultaneously taking hold of her hand, she decided that not merely was his voice rather good, but that it was lovely. "You really have a lovely voice," she told him. He shrugged his shoulders, sighed, and with his stick drew some notes of music in the sand. "I wonder why you never took up opera," she inquired, in tender astonishment. "What's the good? The British public doesn't want British singers. Oh no," he said, with a glance full of reproach for the indifference of the sky, "I'm not fat enough for opera." He went up the tonic scale to "la," frightening away some small sea-birds that had just alighted on the gleaming sand by the tide's edge. "Let me hear your voice," he asked, abruptly. Dorothy was gratified by this request. She had taken for granted the tenor's interest in her appearance, but that this should extend to her voice seemed to indicate something more profound than a casual attraction. She assured him that she was too shy, but he continued to persuade her, and at last she sang a part of one of the leading lady's songs. "Yes, it would be worth while taking some trouble with it," he judged. "If you like I'll give you lessons. Have you got a piano in your rooms?" "We have got a piano this week, as it happens," said Dorothy, "though I should doubt if it had ever been played on. Come to tea this afternoon, and we'll try it." "You live with that Haden girl, don't you?" "Do you think she's pretty?" Dorothy asked. The tenor shrugged his shoulders. "Oh yes, so-so. I really haven't noticed her much. She dyes her hair, I suppose." "No, it's natural," said Dorothy, resisting the temptation to insert a qualifying, "I believe." They discussed the varieties of feminine beauty; when the tenor had managed to convey without direct compliments that Dorothy had every feature a woman ought to have, she was convinced by his good taste that her voice must be out of the ordinary. "Good gracious! It's past two o'clock," she exclaimed, at last, when her appetite began to assert itself in spite of ozone and flattery. "How time flies!" "_I_ dine at half past two. We'd better be strolling back."